New Bay Sox owner right man for the job

Baseball, more than with any other sport, seems to inspire in some people a nearly religious form of appreciation and awe. Pat O'Connor is one of those people.

JONATHAN COMEY

Baseball, more than with any other sport, seems to inspire in some people a nearly religious form of appreciation and awe.

Pat O'Connor is one of those people.

How else to explain an otherwise normal 9-to-5 guy who built a replica of Fenway Park in his Vermont backyard just so he could play wiffle ball there? Then, after turning that field into a spectacularly successful fundraising site, building a Wrigley Field replica there to boot?

How do you figure out a guy who once spent three weeks in the mid-1990s driving across country with his two brothers, seeing every single MLB team play ball and meticulously rating each park from concessions to coaching?

And, most recently, how do you explain a guy whose idea of a perfect investment was to buy the semi-floundering New Bedford Bay Sox — and a house in the city, to boot — and to talk with absolute believability about his vision for the team 10 years from now?

"Baseball is a diamond, perfect diamond," he says in the middle of our 45-minute conversation one Friday morning. He delivers this statement with a dreamy catch in his voice and a little-kid grin. "It's a place to bring people together, lift people's spirits, to help fuel the greater good. Maybe it's a small part we can do, but I know it can be done. I've seen it in action, and I know we're going to get this team on the right track to do that."

O'Connor is in his late 50s, married, with grown children, and has found enough success as a systems analyst and team leader with IBM that he can spend the majority of his summer a couple hundred miles from his office without receiving a pink slip.

One of his first experiences in New Bedford came when he attended the annual Moby-Dick Marathon in January, and was struck by the parallels to his new situation.

"I told my wife, 'This is like the Bay Sox.'" he says. "It's a marathon. It's not a sprint. It's not a quick fix, it's to stay in New Bedford for the long haul."

And much as the Moby-Dick event has grown from year to year thanks to consistency and word-of-mouth, O'Connor hopes to find a similar success as he chases his white whale — summer-ball success in New Bedford, which has been elusive thus far.

He takes over as the team's majority owner from Robyn Wadsworth and Rita Hubner, who brought the New England Collegiate Baseball League team here from Torrington, Conn., in 2009. The team's three-year track record in the city was a spotty one; early enthusiasm faded fairly quickly, the team missed the playoffs in 2010 and 2011, and there was too much turnover on the field and in the front office. In addition, the in-season attrition rate with players was notable — in the first season, barely half of the players on the Opening Day roster made it to season's end. And while the team reported attendance over 1,000 for almost every home game based on tickets distributed (many given away instead of sold for the $5 face value), the actual bodies in the stands were a small fraction of that.

O'Connor doesn't have plans to reinvent the wheel in his first year at the helm. Most of the team's plans are similar to those under previous ownership — field a competitive team, offer a family-friendly experience, reach out through schools and with group outings. The hiring of manager Rick Miller, a former Red Sox outfielder, was a good start to a new era, and the roster is more East Coast and small-school based than in years past.

What O'Connor hopes is that everything will just be a little bit better, and that the foundation already built will continue to get stronger.

"What I tell my team, as we build it, is to get people to come, and when they do, and they have a good time, that when they're leaving, they're saying 'Hey, we want to come back.' And you grow those people over time. You need people on your team with smiles on their faces, paying attention to what it's going to take to make people happy, kids, adults, everyone. That spirit needs to be alive in the park and in the community. We want to be more than a baseball team."

O'Connor has already shown his ability to build on momentum with his Little Fenway field in Essex, Vt. What started as a bit of a whim in 2000 — "I drew a diagram on a coffee-stained napkin" — became something more with the inception of charity events first held there shortly after 9/11. The yearly wiffle ball extravaganza has raised more and more money each year, with well over $1 million going to the Travis Roy Foundation and other causes.

"It's kind of a machine now," he says. "We have a really deep set of volunteers that are into the charity work there, and I felt like if I was going to jump into a new project now would be the time. I have a lot of folks up there that are great supporters, and my direct involvement won't be as necessary as it was a few years ago."

Last year, the SLAMDiabetes organization held an event at O'Connor's two replica fields and raised $150,000 for Type 1 Diabetes research. Founder Jeff Kolop was so taken with the experience that he has made wiffle ball games a cornerstone of his efforts; a portable wiffle ball field will be coming to Walsh Field this summer for a Bay Sox Foundation tournament on July 21.

"New Bedford is getting a man of extraordinary character, I can tell you that," Kolop said of O'Connor. "He is a special person, and someone who it's been a pleasure to get to know."

Whether or not O'Connor will be able to achieve the success other NECBL teams have — notably, the Newport Gulls, who are a summer institution in Rhode Island — is yet to be determined. But you definitely get the impression that O'Connor is the right person with the right temperament for this particular task.

"We're going to be a winning team," he says softly, but with confidence. "I've learned with volunteer networks that when you get them going people want to be a part of it. We can't pay them in money, but I think we can pay them in satisfaction, in what they see happens in the community.

"Every day, this is what's on my mind, and I feel like people need to know in our organization that you just have to stay the course, get better. It's lessons learned, on everything you do. And it works."

Jonathan Comey is sports and features editor for The Standard-Times. Email him at jcomey@s-t.com